The Aristotelian Reconciliation: Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas

The primary goal of 12th and 13th century Scholasticism was to reconcile the natural philosophy of Aristotle with revealed truth of Christian scripture. The impact of Christian thought on the philosophy of the Middle Ages need not be mentioned, for not only was it the most important in terms of influence, it was indeed the entire framework within which medieval philosophers perceived the world. However, beginning in the early 12th century, a new force which had hitherto been unknown or at least obscure enough to escape the notice of all but those scholars lucky enough to have access to his work, began to exert its influence on Western thought. Much like the Bible, Aristotle needs no introduction and if the specifics of his philosophy do not precede him, his reputation does. Throughout the course of the 12th and 13th century, he would become so popular and so emulated that he came to be known simply as Ille Philosophus, "The Philosopher," and this is in large part due to the works of Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas, who were able to resolve many of the differences between and synthesize both the corpus of Christian thought and the writings of the ancient thinker.

The path from obscurity to ubiquity for Aristotle's works in the Middle Ages was an arduous one and more complex than can be attempted here, but we may briefly track its movement. Aristotelian philosophy, like most other intellectual pursuits, gradually faded from the collective consciousness of Western Europe following the fall of the Roman Empire as there was a general dearth of scholars to carry on his work and the more academic nature of his writings did not lend itself to study in the generally difficult life led by most from 500-1000 CE. As we have seen, there were areas where his works were preserved: Boethius' translations formed the backbone of later Latin translations and copyists and scribes in the British Isles and in the Byzantine Empire preserved a fair amount in later centuries as well. But likely the greatest location for the preservation of Aristotelian knowledge was the Islamic world, which, if the Appropriation Theory is correct, managed to add to and improve. The greatest of these was the mid-12th century Muslim Spaniard Averroes (Ibn Rushd), who is often regarded as the founder of secular thought in Western Europe. Among Averroes' many accomplishments include his massively influential commentary on the writings of Aristotle, written in 1160, in which he simplified and summarized Aristotle's philosophy, made editorial comments on them to elucidate their oftentimes difficult concepts, and attempted to tease out the meanings behind Aristotle that may be conciliatory to the Islamic religion. What resulted was a sort of medieval Cliff's Notes version of the works of Aristotle that were read across the Islamic world and soon found their way into the hands of eager European scholars. Averroes was so influential that, for a time, Scholastics who were engaged in the process of synthesizing Aristotle with Christianity were known as Averroists.

To Medieval scholars, the most important ideas to be found in Aristotle's works were the ones related to metaphysics and natural philosophy. While too broad to detail here, some of his more notable theories include the concept of the four element (earth, water, air, and fire) composition of matter and their correspondent qualities, humors, zodiacal signs, etc.; the idea of nature as a "plenum," meaning that one could not reach the smallest portion of matter (the word atom comes from the Greek a tomos meaning "uncuttable"); the sphericity of the earth and the cosmos and the idea of a "natural place" for all elements (earth sank to the center, water on top of it, air rose above these two, and fire ascended to the heavens); the perfect circular motion of heavenly bodies and the difference in the nature of physics below the orbit of the moon (the sublunar sphere) and above the orbit of the moon (the supralunar sphere); and the logical hierarchy of "causes" in nature, among many, many others. It became clear early on, that not all of Aristotle's ideas meshed well with Christian doctrine, but Aristotle's authority was already too great and religious figures of the day likely could not have passed laws forbidding his teachings if they had wanted to. But try they did: in 1210 in Paris a council of bishops forbade the teaching of his works in the French university system and in 1231 in Rome Pope Gregory IX ordered a "clean-up" of Aristotle's works so they would become more palatable to medieval Christian sensibilities. The most notable of "The Philosopher's" beliefs that disagreed with Christianity included his assertion that the cosmos was eternal and had no beginning or end (this denied the Creation as well as the Apocalypse), that the soul and the body are interminably linked (this denied the immortal soul and the prospects for salvation and afterlife), and that miracles were impossible (this, of course, denied God's will). This is where Albertus and Thomas Aquinas enter the picture.

Albertus Magnus (c. 1200-1280) was a German Dominican scholar who was the first to attempt a Christian synthesis of Aristotle's ideas utilizing the same format as Averroes. Albertus, who would later be made a Doctor of the Church (one of only 33 people to hold this title in history), had a lifelong thirst for knowledge that never seems to have been satiated and ranged from theology and philosophy to alchemy and astrology, physics and metaphysics to metallurgy and phrenology. During his lifetime, he managed to compile the majority of Aristotle's known works, make insightful comments upon them as they related to the Christian world view, and preserve his work in a relatively complete form upon which later scholars could draw. However, Albertus is generally considered to have failed in truly creating a systematized Aristotelian corpus which could pass muster among the Church powers who insisted on a thoroughly Christianized philosophy. Albertus' greatest contributions to history were not to be his writings on Aristotle but his advocacy of an experimental method and of a compatibility between science and religion--perhaps broader realizations of his attempts with Aristotle. It is fitting that the scholar who succeeded in this more specific and more laborious task was Albertus Magnus' greatest student, Thomas Aquinas.

Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274) was originally from the country-side around Naples and the son of a minor noble who wanted Thomas to enter a Benedictine monastery as his uncle had done. Thomas' early education was at the state-sponsored University in Naples where he developed an early interest in theology. He was more receptive to Dominican ideals as they had placed a greater emphasis on empiricism and rationality and this eventually led him to Paris where he received instruction from the imminent Albertus Magnus. Where Thomas was able to succeed his master's failures was in the great organizational capacity and originality in his thinking. Thomas regarded Aristotle, not necessarily as an ancient pagan philosopher, but as a brilliant thinker who had the Christian-perceived misfortune of being born before the salvation of Christ. And he viewed Christianity not as an island of meaning, new and disparate from other philosophy, but as a completion and fulfillment of the knowledge originally, if only partially, realized by Aristotle. Aquinas was the first to distance himself from the Augustinian viewpoint of deduction: Augustine had explained everything by taking what was known universally (the existence of God, the salvation of Christ, the path to Heaven, etc.) and derived particulars from this. Thomas, on the other hand, using the quintessentially Scholastic tool of reason, began with what could be discerned rationally among particular cases (a particular murder being evil, arriving at a conception of God after reviewing his individual creations of plants and animals, etc.) and used these to arrive at universal conclusions. His verdict on Aristotle was, essentially, that reason and faith, being separate but complementary, could be used in service of one another--reason had helped Scholastic philosophers arrive at proofs and arguments in favor of the existence of God, and faith was now being used to contend that, as far as Aristotle's natural philosophy was concerned, it could not truly contradict revealed truth if the validity of his ideas were discovered in nature. For was not nature the very dominion of God and the expression of His will at creation? Aquinas would follow Aristotle very closely in this respect, and this would lead him on the path to reworking most of the Philosopher's ideas under the illumination of the light of Christianity.

His greatest work in this endeavor was his Summa Theologica, which would contain the entirety of his new philosophical system. Written between 1265 and 1274, it argued nearly every major point of Christian theology with appeal to reason, including especially the existence of God; the Creation; Man and his purpose; Christ and His life, death and resurrection; and salvation. The work is especially known for its enunciation of "The Five Ways" or quinquae viae, five arguments for the existence of God that have a certain Aristotelian ring to them. The first of the Five Ways can be, and has been, read as the most astonishing example of Aristotelian reconciliation in particular and with Scholastic logic in general. The First Way reads, "God is simple, without composition of parts, such as body and soul, or matter and form." Aristotle had, as we have seen, argued for the eternity of the universe, but had conceded that if there was a beginning, it would necessitate the existence of a "prime mover" or a "first cause"--something that got the ball rolling. Aquinas linked these ideas thusly: To cause change is to bring into being that which had hitherto not existed and this can be done only by something that already existed (as fire is needed to cause burning in matter); a thing causing this change must remain constant itself during the change if the result is to be constant; therefore anything in the process of changing was caused by something prior to it; there must be a terminal point as there will be no original cause of changes if we do not; this first cause must be God. These words are essentially Aristotle's, with the phrase "prime mover" changed to "God." This is Thomist Scholasticism and Aristotelian reconciliation at its finest.

Thanks to Aquinas, not only was Aristotle reinstated in the European university system in the Middle Ages, it was made mandatory in 1255. His separation of natural philosophy from theology made the study of both easily compatible and this is viewed as a proto-attempt to reconcile science and religion. Aquinas himself, however, would leave his greatest work unfinished as he died while writing it in 1274. While celebrating Mass, Aquinas had a mystical vision which he would share with no one, but it obviously had a profound effect on him which changed him deeply. "I cannot go on," he said. "All that I have written seems like so much straw to me [mihi videtur ut palea] compared to what I have seen and what has been revealed to me." Aquinas died four months later. Modern observers believe he may have had a stroke or a nervous breakdown. Others that he received a mystical vision from God, providing him with an instant communion with the ultimate reality beyond logical comprehension, which no words could possibly attempt to describe. Whatever the case, even despite Thomas Aquinas' refusal to complete his opus, his new system of philosophy would dominate the remainder of medieval thought and would not find a replacement until the Protestant reformation 250 years later and the revival of Neoplatonism in the Renaissance. And he would almost single-handedly make Aristotle available for intellectual consumption on a broad scale for the remainder of the Middle Ages.

"Choice, Chance, and the Actions of Others": A Religio-Scientific Interpretation of Free Will

First, imagine the conceivable dimensions of space geometrically: a line connecting two points is the first dimension - it has length but no width or depth. If we add a line branching from this original line, we have created the second dimension - on a plane, these two lines taken as a whole have length and width but no depth. Visualizing the third dimension is the easiest since we live in this dimension, but if we think of this dimension not as a third line on another plane, but as a fold connecting the two original lines, it will help us to imagine dimensions higher than the fourth. So, imagine that we cannot simply draw another line along another plane to give it depth. Now, imagine the third dimension, instead, as a fold of one of the original lines to meet the other line (like a two dimensional ant on the surface of a two dimensional newspaper, or Mario in one of the wrap around screens) being able to seemingly blink from one section to another if we were to fold those two points together. Still, with me? If we imagine the fourth dimension, time or duration, as another geometric line, then the fifth dimension is a line branching from our fourth dimensional line of time. There are infinitely many branches, all of which exist and represent all of the possible future available to us in this universe, but they are inaccessible to us, since we are bound by three dimensions. Getting to any of these branches requires only "choice , chance, and the actions of others", although we can only travel down one of these branches at any given moment. This is another way of saying that free will is our access point to the fifth dimension. We'll return to this notion at the end to demonstrate the conceptual possibility of viewing free will outside the realm of our own three dimensional universe. The implications of these amorphous suppositions have roots in both scientific and religious disciplines, and I wish to explore these in their totality.

I was prompted into deeper thinking about these topics recently because of four things: firstly, the recent posting of my graduate writing sample discusses the concept of free will in the historical context of astrology, witchcraft, the thought of Patristic writers and other pre-modern Christian theologians, and the writings of Shakespeare; secondly, a recent post by my friend Jason on the "implications of omnipotence" and the incompatibility of free will and an omnipotent God; thirdly, my recent, and almost unintentionally relevant, reading of two books on the topic: Science and Creation: A Search for Understanding by theoretical physicist turned Anglican priest John Polkinghorne and Freedom of Choice Affirmed by agnostic humanist philosopher Corliss Lamont; and fourthly, the previous video, linked here and above, which, quite frankly, was mind-boggling to me the first time I watched it, but which illustrates how to visualize dimensions higher than the fourth. This has profound implications for what we may call free will or the freedom of choice. Since I've already posted 15,000 words or so on the first section, we'll jump right into the blog post, books, and end by reconceptualizing the contents of the video within the context of free will.

In the discourse of the modern day discussion of free will vs. determinism, one must begin with the Church Fathers and Christian theologians of the Middle Ages. And, if we begin with the most influential of them all, Augustine, we immediately run into contradictory interpretations of the phenomenon. On the one hand, Augustine seems to deny free will, giving all power over the past, present, and future to God. He states that the number of saved souls is fixed, has been since the beginning of time, and that all are predestined to go either to heaven or hell. But Augustine, perhaps counterintuitively from a contemporary perspective, differentiates between determinism and predestination. The former is an absolute fixity in the future of the universe, which he denies, whereas the second only refers to the ultimate fate of individual souls, whose choices, freely made, determine their final location. The Catholic Church, which holds the existence of free will to be compatible with its doctrine, regards the writings of Augustine as affirming free will, in that he asserts that "any can be saved if they wish." Indeed, the Calvinist view of hard determinism would be diametrically opposed to the Catholic doctrine of free will beginning in the 16th century. The difference is merely in the perspective - our lack of knowledge as to our ultimate fate renders free will a reality, while from God's perspective, it is already known and decided. While contradictory, this nevertheless represents Augustine's and the Church's position, as Augustine constantly refers to free will as the ability of any person to accept Christ and thus be saved through grace. He says as much in his theological treatise "On Free Choice of the Will". The pre-determinism found in his writings is usually contextualized with the contemporary heresy of Pelagianism that Augustine was combating - Pelagius taught that humans could be saved of their own accord and did not need the saving grace of Christ, which Augustine rejected.

If free will is equivalent to freedom of choice, then perhaps the question lies in cause and effect. Here, however, the verdict, both philosophical and scientific, is still out. One of the earliest and most influential conceptions of cause and effect, is Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover," an imagined originator of the universe, defined as the original cause through which all existence may be termed an effect. Though the idea may seem similar to the concept of "God", it must be noted that Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover" was not anthropomorphic and did not play an active role in creation as the Judeo-Christian God did. Thus, it was originally considered incompatible with the creator God until the the great Scholastic Thomas Aquinas. Aquinas did Aristotle one better, or five better as it were. Aristotle had contended that the universe was eternal and had proposed the idea of a hypothetical "Unmoved Mover" as a necessary attribute of any universe that did have a temporal beginning. Aquinas, who as a Christian believed in a finite universe with a definite temporal beginning, took the "Unmoved Mover" concept as a given and as his starting point for his Quinquae Viae, or the Five Ways. The Five Ways, originally conceived as a rational approach to proving the existence of God, also contains major implications for the conflict between free will and determinism. Polkinghorne simplifies them thusly: "1) The existence of change...conclude[s] that there must be a first originator of change; 2) the existence of causation...conclude[s] that there must be a first cause; 3) the existence of coming to be and ceasing to be...conclude[s] that the world's actual continuance requires an unchanging ground of its existence; 4) the existence of gradations and qualities...conclude[s] that there must be one whose perfection is the ground for all partial qualities; 5) the existence of purpose in this world...conclude[s] the necessity of an intelligence directing it." (I plan on posting more on this later). A "first cause" equivalent to God implies a certain top-down control in the matter if we accept Aquinas' version of a "first cause" rather than Aristotle's, though I think Polkinghorne is right when he points out that Aquinas was more concerned with a "logical hierarchy" than a "temporal priority." This continues to muddy the argument and even though the official Catholic position is one of free will, the greatest writings on the matter do not shed any particularly coherent light on the issue.

Science, however, is no clearer. Traditional Newtonian physics is fairly cut and dried. It is classically mechanistic: 1) a body at rest or in uniform motion stays in that state unless acted upon by an external force, 2) force equals mass times the acceleration of a given object (F=ma), and 3) for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. These are Newton's three laws of motion simplified, and these, in some ways, also seem to imply determinism. The late 18th century French physicist and astronomer Pierre-Simon Laplace used these physical laws to create his own thought experiment, oftentimes called "Laplace's demon", which posits that if a demon with unlimited calculating power were given the location and momentum of every atom in the universe, he could predict the entire future of that universe. Carried further, this suggests that, of course, no human (Hari Seldon aside) could ever have this knowledge considering our own intellectual limitations, but an infinitely superior being with such power could in fact have such knowledge. Laplace called this being a demon, but what is to stop us in our conceptual language from granting this ability to God? Again, is this not exactly the God described by the Calvinists? This is where the conflict between knowing the future and controlling the future comes into play, which Augustine and other Christians have explained simply as a difference in perception. But, we must push this idea even further. As it turns out, Newtonian physics only describes the universe in general macroscopic terms, and at very small sizes and very fast velocities, it does not describe reality accurately. The determinism of Laplace's demon is overturned by Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, which states that if one knows the location of a subatomic particle, one cannot know its precise momentum, and if one knows the momentum of a subatomic particle, its precise location is indeterminate. So much for a demon with a calculator knowing our future - he can never input both variables into his equation. Einstein famously mused, in regards to quantum mechanics, that "God does not play dice." By playing dice, though, quantum physics, at least in this respect, affirms a universe of free choice.

The truth of the matter remains murky, and even more recent scientific discoveries swing the pendulum back in the direction of determinism: certain electrons seem to be able to "communicate" with each other no matter the distance and in certain experiments involving these electrons, effects are quite capable of appearing before causes (according to some). Recent studies by neurobiologists and cognitive scientists in the realm of simple voluntary movement have shown that the brain is aware of the movements we are about to make before our conscious minds are. Chance is another conundrum. What we call chance, may not really be chance at all (though I don't suspect a coin flip in our universe will come up heads ninety-two times in a row) but "infinitely complex order." When odds are calculated in a coin flip, for example, one would say that the odds of a coin coming up heads is 1 in 2, all things being equal. In reality, all things are never equal, and variations in the weight of the coin, the strength and direction of the toss, which side it is on to begin with, how many times it bounces, etc. will have an effect on the outcome. Only the hypothetical continuation of the flip for all eternity will give a statistical average of 1 in 2. Chance is simply infinitely complex order, indistinguishable from what we may call chaos but which is not chaos. In other words, order and disorder are not mutually exclusive, but "disorder" is simply order so complex as to be unpredictable and thus equivalent to what we would call chance. Perhaps free will is this very form of "unpredictability", so complex at a universal scale, that only God Himself is capable of discerning the order from the disorder. The acausal connecting principle synchronicity, by this definition, could be defined as more than chance - it could be a pattern found in the apparent disorder of the universe, a glimpse at the infinite complexity of reality. In short, science is no clearer than religion is on this matter.

Justice is an entirely separate concern. If we ask the question "Do humans have free will?" and the answer is no, does this necessarily imply that the universe is unjust? Some critics point out, I believe with a fair amount of justification, the incompatibility of an omniscient and omnipotent God who nevertheless has endowed us with free will. If an all-knowing and all-powerful God, both established conditions for Christian belief, truly does exist, then His knowledge about the universe, the criticism goes, implies that your choice is really His choice (an effect that can trace itself all the way back to Aquinas' "First Cause" of Aristotle's "Unmoved Mover"), and this lack of control on our part is unjust. The traditional Christian rebuttal would be something to the effect of "God exists outside of time and space and thus His knowledge does not affect your will. All of eternity is a continual unified 'present' from God's perspective, whereas we are forced to perceive the universe temporally and spatially." Implicit in this argument is the fact that, as God exists outside of any conceptual framework we could ever attempt to comprehend, so too is His justice and judgment beyond our comprehension.

In closing, let us return to the thought experiment we began with. Beyond our perceivable three spatial dimensions and the fourth of time, superstring theory posits the existence of 10 dimensions (or 11 if time is included as a dimension rather than a "direction"). The fifth dimension, according to the geometric concept laid out in the opening paragraph, consists of branches extending out from the "line" of time. In the totality of the universe, the point from which we start "contains" all of three dimensional space starting with the big bang and the point where the line ends is the temporal and spatial end of the universe. But, since time is not fixed (at least from our three dimensional perspective), there are an infinite number of "branches" from this line that creates the fifth dimension (heat death, big crunch, etc.). A "folding" of this fifth dimensional line to meet another fifth dimensional line takes us into the sixth dimension, and this would be the equivalent of a warp or wormhole leading to another timeline within our own universe. Then, taking all these branches as a new geometric point (just as we did to the first three dimensions), we could term this "infinity", since every timeline that could possibly exist within our universe exists within this point. We can then draw a line from this infinity to entirely different infinities. How is this possible? Because the first "infinity point" contains only all possible timelines in our current universe and does not contain timelines from other universes (the "multiverse"), where the initial conditions following the big bang are different and create different physical laws (for example, another universe may have a light speed faster than ours or a boiling point of water higher than 100 Celsius or where gravity is stronger than the electro-magnetic force, etc.) Following the original premise, branches and folds produce the eighth and ninth dimensions, which, when collapsed into a point, creates the tenth dimension. No more lines can be drawn from here, since we have already exahausted "all possible timelines for all possible universes". Does this make sense? No, not really. . . just watch the video. It will be easier to understand it conceptually as opposed to reading an imperfect verbal description. So what's the point in describing all these dimensions? Because, according to this conceptualization of supersting theory's "higher dimensions," everything that exists beyond the fifth dimension is dependent upon "choice, chance, and the action of others" in order to exist. All of the possible future timelines (the fifth dimensional branches from our fourth dimensional "line" of time) require our active choice to occur. Or, put another way, the indeterminate nature of the future is simply another way of envisioning the necessity of choice. If we could picture an entity or being that exists in or beyond the 10th dimension, who would necessarily have access to the lower dimensions (as we have access to the second and first), does their knowledge of time, our future, all possible futures, and all possible other universes abrogate our own free will? At least in this respect, I'm not sure that knowledge equals control, even if creation is implied.

I find it telling that Corliss Lamont titled his book Freedom of Choice Affrimed rather than Confirmed. Confirmation presupposes objective knowledge about the subject, and this may prove impossible. This essay was not meant to prove free will valid or invalid, but to shed some light on a new way of thinking about the issue. However, I am certain I feel more confused after exploring this topic over the past week, than less. But when we open new doors we often find ourselves in rooms with completely new mental furniture. And this is never a bad thing.

Tout comprendre, c'est tout accepter. . .